Veering Off in Venice
At the National Gallery, A Renaissance Shift That Set Narrative Aside

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 18, 2006; Page N01

Imagine a world where all our modern bromides about art were still fresh ideas.

Where an image of a naked woman in a landscape wasn't a cheesy cliche, but a radical move. Where you could be the first person ever to take pleasure in a flashy brushstroke. Where artists were just starting to contemplate the possibility that a work's meanings might be suggestive and slippery rather than all tied down.

Such an art world once existed -- in Venice, circa 1515.

A stunning exhibition opening today at the National Gallery called "Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting" puts us at the moment when the business-as-usual of later Western art was still deeply unusual.

It's easy to take endless pleasure in the best of these paintings. It's hard to imagine they could leave anyone cold.

Titian's "Noli Me Tangere," a smallish painting of a rolling landscape in which a miraculously graceful Christ meets an equally exquisite Mary Magdalene, would be a strong contender as most beautiful picture of all time.

Titian's "Portrait of a Man With a Glove," from the Louvre, and his "Bacchanal of the Andrians," a huge picture of sun-licked frolics that has come here from the Prado in Madrid, are very nearly as great. Likewise several pictures by his rival Sebastiano del Piombo; by Giorgione, the young master who had kick-started the new style but died in 1510, before it flourished; and by Giovanni Bellini, the grand old man of Venetian art who launched the city's scene in the 1470s and continued to move it forward right up to his death in 1516. Even theoretically "lesser" Venetian artists such as Palma Vecchio, Paris Bordone and Gian Girolamo Savoldo turn out works that are easy on the eyes and absolutely charming.

What's harder to recognize at our late date is all the radicalism and novelty that underlies the beauty.

Take Titian's "Noli Me Tangere," painted around 1514, when he was perhaps 25 years old. (His early dates are very vague; he died in 1576 as one of his era's most admired artists.) The picture's title refers to the moment when the risen Christ, in the guise of a gardener, is supposed to have encountered the former prostitute, saying to her, "Do not touch me" -- the Latin words of the title that is traditionally given to this picture -- because He was no longer of this world.

Christ may not have been of this world, but Titian's picture certainly is.

A picture that is supposed to be about a famous injunction not to touch, coming from a figure who has just transcended the material, is all about materiality and touch. The picture shifts the emphasis from Christ's warning to Mary's desire, and runs with that. The gorgeous flesh of the nearly naked Savior, and the Magdalene's luxuriant blond hair and silk robes, do more to invite caresses than ward them off. The saint herself is looking awfully hands-on, with fingers tightly clutched around her golden jar of ointment or reaching out to grasp at her beloved Lord, who in turn is busy fingering the fine cloth he's wrapped in.

But the crucial act of touching in this painting is the artist's own, as he lays down the visible "touches" of paint that make it up. Paint appears for its own sake, in thick swirls and aggressive dabs, as it had never done before in Western art.

Look closely at Christ's loincloth -- Renaissance collectors almost certainly got closer to their pictures than we do -- and it dissolves into a vortex of white brushstrokes. A cloth that's supposed to be about hiding something draws attention to itself and to whatever it conceals -- and yet it does that by becoming an obviously painted surface rather than a picture of some object in the world. That is, this passage points as much to the virtuosic making of the picture as to the piece of cloth that it's supposed to show.

The picture comes to be about the "now" of Titian's labor at his easel and of his admiring connoisseurs, as well as about the "then" of the Christian story. Earlier Renaissance artists -- even the young Bellini -- had used the new medium of oil paint to achieve a kind of transparency in their art: The man-made surface of the picture was supposed to get out of the way, giving viewers unhampered access to the subject it reveals so realistically. Titian discovered that oils could also be used to resist that whole idea. His bravura brushwork always insists on the painting as a surface worked up from edge to edge -- as a splendid example of a modern master's handiwork. It's hard to overestimate the novelty of that idea, and of Titian's new technique.

If the surface of Titian's painting rejects transparency, so does its subject. Christ and Mary Magdalene aren't at the center of things, the way they might once have been in an image meant to aid Christian devotion. The landscape in this picture has grown, and the two figures have shrunk back into it, almost to the point where they're just a couple of more items that happen to have come under Titian's brush, like two more trees or a pair of sheep. Can you imagine someone praying to them? The old hierarchy that would have made the Christian subject absolutely central had given way to a kind of equal-opportunity describing.

Of course, you're still meant to read Titian's picture for its Christian story. But now there's a deliberate act of reading involved. You could say that the picture now makes you read its story into it -- a very modern act -- rather than doing its best to help you read through it to its story.

We still praise artists for their skill at illustrating narratives. In Venice after 1500, we're also being asked to praise them for resisting such a simplifying urge.

Giorgione, a slightly older painter who may have had a role in teaching Titian, is famous as the first great obfuscator in art history. The "Tempesta," his most important painting (so important it never leaves its home in Venice), still has scholars arguing about what it could possibly mean. A contemporary witness seems to have been equally perplexed, describing it only as "a small landscape on canvas with a storm and a gypsy and a soldier" without taking any stab at further interpretation. That may be as Giorgione intended: His paintings don't seem esoteric, in the sense of having a single deeply hidden meaning that needs to be unpacked. They invite a viewer's eye and mind to wander among the things they show and the meanings they suggest -- because that wandering and those things matter as much as any single story they might serve.

The National Gallery's "Allendale Nativity," thought to be by Giorgione and presumed to have been painted around 1500, treats the visit of the shepherds to the newborn Christ as Titian later treated Christ's encounter with the Magdalene. The baby is pushed off to one side, and becomes one object among many in the picture, not all of which are necessary to its storytelling. (This exhibition lets you plot the crucial shift of sacred subject matter from the center of a composition, in Bellini and his lesser followers, to the side in Giorgione and Titian.) The nativity is seamlessly incorporated into Giorgione's landscape -- Jesus lies right on the ground, in front of a looming cave mouth -- rather than having nature acting as a distant backdrop to the story. The people in the picture, that is, are subjects set in nature, and figures on a painted ground, as much as they are sacred agents in one specific sacred narrative.

In Venetian painting, figures and compositions are, in fact, interchangeable across different subjects in a way they never were before. Art historian Alexander Nagel, visiting the National Gallery as its current Mellon Professor, argued in a recent lecture that, for these Venetian painters, the look of a figure or a landscape or a composition -- possibly borrowed from another work, with a different subject -- is where the artist begins. Meanings get grafted onto these as a painting takes shape. The final "shape" of the painting, rather than some fixed meaning chosen in advance, is the essential fact about it.

That may be why the standard categories that are used to sort art out start to break down when you're looking at Venetian pictures. A clearly secular scene, such as Titian's great "Concert Champetre" (the "Pastoral Concert") from the Louvre -- which has crossed the ocean for the first time for this show -- is built around the same framework as a biblical narrative such as Palma Vecchio's "Meeting of Jacob and Rachel," which is in the same pictorial ballpark as Paris Bordone's "Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine," a picture that gathers together a Holy Family and various saints without having much of a tale to tell.

All these pictures show groups of figures lolling on the grass; as you pass from gallery to gallery in this exhibition, you have to work to note the very different things those crowds are up to. That's because the difference isn't necessarily what these pictures are about; they're just as much about a certain look and feel they share.

Confusion reigns in close-up pictures, too. It's often very hard to tell what's meant to be a commemorative portrait of a single, real-life individual, photo-album style, and what's a more generic image of a "type" of human character -- a model paid to pose as a "Beautiful Lady" or "Poetic Man." Both can even be confused with what might be a holy figure.

Sebastiano del Piombo's exquisite painting of a well-dressed woman carrying a basket of flowers might be a picture of Saint Dorothea, who was symbolized by such bouquets. Or it could be a formal portrait -- maybe a bridal image -- of a woman who happens to bear that name. Or it could turn out to be about sex (which became an independent subject around this time in Venice, as shown in this show's several nudes) by representing one of the city's high-end courtesans: It might either commemorate some male patron's favorite mistress (could it be his fancy cloak that's falling off her?) or invoke the whole class of beautiful, available women. And in all and any of those cases, the picture must also stand for Sebastiano's extraordinary skill. His rendering of "Dorothea's" sleeve and of the lynx-fur edging on her cloak is possibly the most impressive paint-work of its time.

This show includes a head-and-shoulders image of Christ carrying the cross, by some yet-to-be-named but fiendishly talented artist, which could easily pass as a portrait of some particular Venetian beau. But it also features pictures such as Titian's "Man With a Glove," which probably stood originally for some particular individual but could also function as the evocation of a type -- in this case the dreamy, elegant courtier. In Venetian art, a picture's subject could float free of some particular reality it pointed to, just as its paint could float free of any object that brushwork was meant to represent.

Venetian pictures don't ask a viewer to pray, or recognize, or decipher, or even to tumesce. By refusing to commit to what they're all about, they ask you first to look , and then to go on from there. The pioneering radicals of Venice took care to make a picture look like excellent art. What to do with it, even how to think about it, was up to the viewer. It has been ever since.